Jacob had always been a fan of retro-futurism, finding the ideas that classic pulp stories and B-movies had of things like alien invaders and futuristic machinery both fascinating and amusing. Another member of the team had been playing a Flash game that featured a progression system wherein the player would unlock new abilities and gear that would help them get a little farther every time they played.Īs for the game’s theme, with the center of the game being a plasma sword, science-fiction seemed like the best choice. Jacob felt the idea of a runner was simple and quite enjoyable, suiting the mobile platform particularly well. Monster Dash was an auto-running action-game made by Halfbrick. The team found inspiration in games they themselves were enjoying quite a bit at the time. As any fan of Star Wars knows, however, there are quite a few different kinds of games that could contain such gameplay. He wanted to make a game focused on combat where the character wielded a plasma sword. The seed of this project was an idea that Jacob simply couldn’t let go of. Now sufficiently warmed up, the team was ready to take on something bigger. An unusual match-3 puzzle game, Repulse-O secured the developer’s first App Store Feature from Apple. Since it was the first time the team was working together, however, they opted instead to put together another simple game just to get their feet wet. Jacob wanted to go back to his original idea, and in anticipation of that plan the studio brought in eight part-timers. Later in the year, Jacob was joined by a friend named Ghislain Bernier, adding his programming experience and bringing XperimentalZ Games up to two full-time employees. While it wasn’t a hit by any means, the game proved to be an excellent learning experience for Jacob. After an initial idea proved to be a bit too complicated to realize, Jacob put together a smaller game in a matter of a few months called Gravitation Defense. He started XperimentalZ Games soon after leaving Gameloft, but at the time it was just a one-person studio. He wanted to be a part of that, and decided to strike out on his own in 2010.
Looking around at the landscape of the mobile gaming market, Jacob felt that the market was about to make a major shift and go back to the roots of video gaming. Having grown up in the Atari 2600 era on games like Pac-Man and Missile Command, Jacob was a big fan of games that were both simple and fun. Jacob had formerly worked at Gameloft, where he served as a lead designer on a popular racing game. XperimentalZ Games was founded in Montreal, Canada in 2010 by Patrick Jacob.
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